Id never made applejack, and he told me how. You put a barrel of cider outside in the winter, and the top where the water is freezes, and you throw away that ice, then do it again and again till youre left with just a little in the barrel, but its strong like its got fire in it with jest a little taste of apple behind it. James wouldnt drink it, said it was a waste of good cider. I didnt care-that was more jack for me. And John Chapman was right-when it was in my blood the skeeters didnt like it and left me alone, and the swamp fever didnt come. The problem was keepin enough jack around to last till August when it was really needed. We needed to make more jack, meanin we needed more trees-spitters, not the eaters from Connecticut James loved more than his own wife. Golden Pippins. I didnt understand why he thought they taste so good. Went on bout honey and pineapple when all them apples tasted like was apples.
The next morning was a gray, rainy day, and James was teaching Robert how to graft. He had shown his son the process before, but now that he was almost nine, he was old enough to take in and retain information and make it his own.
Other years Sadie came out to watch James graft and make harsh remarks about ruining perfectly good trees. Today, though, she was still asleep, stinking of the applejack she had drunk the night before. Since John Chapman’s departure she had been drinking steadily. She was an unpredictable drunk-angry and violent one minute, crying and petting the children the next. Sometimes she would sit in a corner and talk to one of her dead children-usually Patty-as if they were there with her. The living Goodenoughs had learned to ignore Sadie, though Nathan and Sal enjoyed the petting.
“We ready?” James said to his son. “You got the scions?”
Robert held up the bundle of branches James had cut from the centers of the Golden Pippins when pruning them in November; he’d carefully stored them in the cellar behind wooden boxes of apples and carrots and potatoes, sticking the ends in a pile of soil for the winter. He’d hidden another bundle in the woods in case Sadie discovered and burned the cellar scions as she had one year, claiming she’d run out of kindling.
Lined up neatly on the ground were the tools and materials they needed for grafting: a saw, a hammer and chisel, a knife James had sharpened the previous night, a pile of strips torn from one of Sadie’s old aprons and a bucket of grafting clay made from a mixture of river clay and horse dung, plus the contents of Sadie’s hairbrush over a few weeks, which he’d had Martha gather without her mother’s knowledge. He had also brought one of the sacks of sand he’d dug up a few years before from the Lake Erie shore, making a special trip to get it. Golden Pippins particularly favored sandy soil, and James would need to fork in sand around the grafts now and then.
Though they were ready-tools and scions and clay and sand and son-James did not move yet, but stood in the light rain with his trees. He could almost see the branches unclenching after the frozen winter, the sap starting to circulate, buds emerging in tiny dots like foxes poking their noses from their dens, testing the air. Colorless now, in a few weeks those dots would show green, signaling the leaves to come. Growth seemed to happen so slowly and yet each year leaves and blossoms and fruit came and went in their cyclical miracle.
The process of grafting did not take long, but like everything he did with apple trees-planting, winter and summer pruning, picking-James was methodical. Now, however, he must be bold. “All right,” he said. Picking up the saw, he stepped up to one of the spitters-a mediocre producer, planted from a John Chapman seedling four years back-grasped the trunk at waist height and sawed rapidly through it, trying not to look at the nascent buds dotted along all of the branches he was cutting off, for those buds would have produced leaves and flowers and fruit. He always did this fast, as it was the destructive part, and he did not like to dwell on it. He must also move quickly before Sadie came out and witnessed the sacrifice of the source of her applejack. When she saw only the results-two sticks bound to a trunk with a ball of clay surrounding the join-rather than the act, she was not so likely to lose her temper. Confronted with something new, it could be surprisingly easy to forget what had been there before, like a man’s freshly shaved beard drawing attention instead to his long hair.
The cross-section of the sacrificial tree was about three inches across-enough for two scions. “This needs to be good and flat,” he said to Robert, scraping the surface with his knife. Then he took up the hammer and chisel. “Now we make a cut about two inches deep, straight across.” As James hammered carefully, the feel of the handle, the tinking of metal against metal, the presence of his son at his elbow, the dripping trees, all made him think of being with his father in Connecticut, learning so that he too could create good trees and pass on the skill, over and over along the chain of Goodenoughs stretching into the future. It was not always easy to feel a part of that chain while living in the Black Swamp, especially when a child every other year was being sacrificed to it, but when he was working on apple trees, he could feel its unique tug.
James cut the ends of two Golden Pippin scions into wedge shapes. “Look here,” he said to Robert, showing him the ends. “A graft’ll be more likely to take if there’s a bud eye at the base of the wedge-see there?-where the bark begins again. Buds attract sap. You get that sap circulating through the two bits of wood, that knits them together into one tree.”
Robert nodded.
They were inserting two scions into the cross-section cleft when Sal appeared. James wished she hadn’t arrived at this delicate moment in the process, with him holding open the cleft with the chisel and directing Robert to fit the scions so the bark matched that of the root stock and a bud eye was just above the surface. Only when both scions were in the right place could he withdraw the chisel so that the cleft closed around them. They had already tried it once and pulled the scions back out to cut new ends that would fit better. James did not need the daughter who reminded him the most of Sadie to come and sit nearby on a stump, and then not even watch what they were doing, but pick at the dry mud on the hem of her skirt. If she was going to be there, he wanted her to care about grafting.
“Your Ma up?” he asked, with the vague hope that a question might lure her over. Who could not be interested in the surprise and magic of grafting?
But Sal did not look up from her futile picking-any mud she removed would soon be replaced by more. “Just for some water. Said her head hurt.”
“You getting dinner on?”
Sal shrugged, a gesture she used often. Even aged twelve she had learned that it was no good caring about things too much, and she held the world at an arm’s length. “Martha’s doin’ it.”
“The boys still working in the barn?”
When she did not answer, James said, “You go and dig up the garden, then.”
“It’s raining.”
“That’ll make the ground easier to dig.” James renewed his grip on the chisel. Robert was fumbling with the scions, turning them to find just the right position. “Go on, now.” When Sal did not move, James pulled the chisel from the cleft and stepped towards her. “Git!”